Nurse, mother of three, killed in car crash, family looks for answers

May 3, 2013

Angela Schmidt and her three sons. / Submitted photo

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Angela Schmidt spent the last hours of her life Sunday with her three sons at a soccer game. She took them out to lunch before heading toward her Kansas home.

She was killed about 4 p.m. after her Honda crossed the center line of Route 96, near Halltown in Lawrence County. The afternoon was sunny with a slight breeze. Her relatives are left looking for explanations.

Schmidt’s ex-husband, Leon Melvin, was told of her death by a state trooper at a service station as he was standing, ready to pump gas. They had been together at the soccer game where their youngest son, 10-year-old Luke, is the team captain. Their two other sons are Joseph, 14, and Jacob, 13.

“I just wish she hadn’t been on that road, that highway,” Melvin said.

Missouri has a rate of fatal accidents on its rural roads more than twice as high as the national average, according to TRIP, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that does transportation research. Missouri had 1.97 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles of travel on its rural roads in 2011. The national rate was 0.75.

But Joe Rickman, the district traffic engineer for the Missouri Department of Transportation, said there have been few fatalities on the five-mile stretch of road where Schmidt died.

The last fatal accident was in 2009.

“It’s not a high-crash area,” Rickman said.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol is investigating the accident. The other driver, Jeff Misner, 50, of Joplin, was not ticketed, according to the highway patrol

Schmidt, 41, was a nurse at Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, who had previously worked for CoxHealth and at Oxford HealthCare.

“Angela was a member of our nursing family for a short time but was known among our entire team for her clinical expertise, compassion, empathy for patients and their families, and intense commitment to delivering perfect care for her critical care patients,” said Allen Overturf, the critical care services director at Freeman.

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At CoxHealth, she cared for premature babies.

“My daughter had an incredible gift,” said Connie Schmidt. “I always said she was an angel. She would catch the babies from heaven. Those little bitty babies.”

Connie Schmidt said her daughter kept cards from the infants’ parents on her refrigerator. She would call her mother about the babies who didn’t survive.

“She played this important role for God to help them through that,” Connie Schmidt said. “She took that role very seriously.”

Connie Schmidt said her daughter became a nurse after volunteering as a candy striper as a teenager.

Laura Donkers, who worked with Schmidt at Cox South, said parents of infants born prematurely often wanted to try to do something to fix what had gone wrong.

“When they find out they can’t fix this, that’s when they take their hands out of their pockets and touch the babies,” Donkers said.

Misner told the News-Leader he was driving east when he saw Schmidt’s car in his lane, almost on the shoulder. A pickup truck was also driving west. Misner said he thought there might be enough room to go between the two vehicles. Then Schmidt jerked the wheel, and he couldn’t avoid her.

Misner said he has been driving commercially for 27 years.

“Never had an accident up until Sunday,” he said.

Schmidt had a clean driving record, according to Missouri records.

Her finance, Chris Drimmel, said she had fainted repeatedly in recent weeks and speculated that something had happened while she was driving. He said she had temporarily worn a heart monitor and was scheduled for a follow-up visit with a doctor.

“She had the most tender heart,” Drimmel said. “She was just so special.”

Donkers said she last talked to Schmidt the Friday before the accident. Schmidt talked about her sons and their plans for the weekend. They ended each conversation with “I love you,” something Donkers said comes naturally because nurses know all too well that some day they will never get to say that endearment again.

But Donkers said she and Schmidt never talked about the prospect of their own deaths.

“We never, ever, ever talked about the deaths of ourselves,” Donkers said. “It wasn’t going to happen. We have babies to raise.”